Get Your Marcels!

by
November 18, 2008

Tom Tango has released the official 2009 Marcel the Monkey projections. They’re available here on FanGraphs in both the sortable variety and in all the player pages too!

Here’s exactly what they are:

“[Marcels] is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. So, that’s the allusion to the monkey. It uses 3 years of MLB data, with the most recent data weighted heavier. It regresses towards the mean. And it has an age factor.”





 

David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

13 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jim
15 years ago

What are these Marcel predictions? How exactly do they work? Because every single player; let me repeat that: every single player I looked up is predicted to have a worse year in most categories by Marcel. For example, Ryan Howard is expected to hit 40 homeruns. He’s not yet 30 and has hit at least 47 homeruns in each of the last 3 seasons. How by any stretch is he expected to hit only 40 unless he becomes injured? Even young players where improvement should be expected are projected to have worse years. It makes no sense to me.

0